Shakshuka

Shakshuka is eggs poached whole in a spiced tomato and pepper sauce, served in the pan. Its origins are North African — most often traced to Tunisia, where tomatoes and peppers arrived via Ottoman trade routes — and it spread through the Maghreb before becoming a fixture across the Levant. It's also worth saying plainly that shakshuka is today one of the dishes most strongly associated with Israeli cuisine internationally, carried there largely by North African and Middle Eastern Jewish immigrants in the mid-twentieth century — a dish considerably older than the country now most famous for serving it at breakfast.

What it actually is

Onion, peppers and garlic are softened in oil. Tomatoes go in with cumin, paprika and often chilli or harissa, and cook down until the sauce is thick enough to hold a shape.

Then wells are pressed into the sauce and whole eggs are cracked into them. The pan is covered, and the eggs poach in the sauce until the whites are set and the yolks are still runny. That is the target, and it is the only genuinely time-sensitive part.

It is not menemen. The two dishes get confused constantly, but the method differs: in Turkish menemen the eggs are folded through the tomato base; in shakshuka they stay whole and poached. Same ingredients, different dish.

How it's served

• In the pan it was cooked in, straight to the table, shared.
• With bread — pita, flatbread or challah — for scooping. No cutlery needed.
• With additions: crumbled feta or a spoon of labneh, merguez, olives or spinach, and coriander or parsley on top.

Writing it on a menu

• Say the eggs are whole and poached, and how many. Guests expecting scrambled will otherwise think something went wrong.
• Note the heat level — harissa versions can be genuinely hot, and this is the most common complaint.
• List additions separately: plain, with feta, with merguez. They change the price and the allergens.
• It is vegetarian and gluten-free in itself; the bread served alongside is not, and merguez makes it neither.